A French Chevalier for scholarly societal contributions

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona in San Francisco.

Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Berkeley’s Program of Critical Theory, where she served as founding director, received the formal honor from Consul General Pauline Carmona at ceremonies in San Francisco. Butler was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry in 2013. This week she was pinned with the medal itself.

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier in the Order of Arts et Lettres for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona.

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona in San Francisco.

Carmona noted at the award ceremony the strength of Butler’s links with French scholars and intellectuals and the profound impact her work has had on France’s society, especially in the fields of feminism and gender studies.

Butler is active in gender and sexual politics, human rights and anti-war politics, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She was recently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13). She received the Adorno Prize from the city of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, as well as the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies.

She is the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford and American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the College des Hautes Etudes in Paris. She has received honorary degrees from Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University and the University of St. Andrews. In 2013 she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry. In November 2014, Butler received an honorary degree from the Universite Fribourg in Switzerland.

She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Source: UC Berkeley

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Victims of violence given voice in upcoming play

Members of the cast and production crew talk over a scene during a rehearsal for the Queen’s Drama Department’s upcoming staging of If We Were Birds at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. (Photo by Allie Gottlieb)

For its winter major production the Queen’s Department of Drama is staging one of the most powerful contemporary Canadian plays.

If We Were Birds is a Governor-General Award winning play by Erin Shields based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the poem that also inspired Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and is a poetic re-telling of the myth of sisters Philomela and Procne. In Shields’ work the ancient tale is transformed into a modern parable about violence against women in times of war as revealed through a chorus of testimonials of loss and suffering.

The play was selected as it has a large female cast explains drama professor and director Kim Renders, who points out that the department is comprised primarily of women. She also says the subject matter is particularly timely because of the ongoing conversation on campuses across the country, including Queen’s, surrounding sexual assault.

It’s a powerful play, Renders says, and a great script,

As a result, one of the main challenges in the production has been how to handle the powerful testimonials. There are times when the material is so heavy that a lighter touch may be required, Renders says.

“Dealing with this script at various times, that’s the balancing act,” she says. “When do we really punch it in and drive it home to the audience with hair pulling and chest beating and when do you need to hold back and just let the words do the work by themselves.”

Months of preparations are down to the final weeks and days but there is an eagerness to take to the stage. Renders, a co-founder of Nightwood Theatre and former artistic director of Theatre Kingston, says she is impressed by how the students are approaching the play from acting and production perspectives as well as the three student assistant directors.

“I’m feeling people are taking a very responsible approach to the material, very mature, professional,” Renders says. “People are quite dedicated to the work, and there is a ton of work because one of the students, Adrienne Miller , is choreographing the chorus and another student, Deanna Choi, is creating a soundscape that goes all the way through the entire production. And she is also playing music live.”

For the assistant directors it’s a further learning experience as they step off the stage and take on wider responsibilities.

“I think that being an assistant director is a very interesting learning experience because we are observers on one part, where we are watching and learning from Kim and her decisions as well as the actors,” says Holly Molaski (Artsci’15). “With such a big cast they have so many ideas too. So I’m really trying to observe and get ideas from everyone else.”

For Colleen Rush (Artsci’15) seeing the wider scope of the production has been valuable.

“What I’ve found interesting is seeing how quickly the images take form,” she says. “I also find interesting that Holly and I have a lot of input and it matches up. There’s a lot of agreeing.”

If We Were Birds will be staged at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Performances will take place in the Studio Theatre Feb. 4-7 and 12 at 8 pm, with a matinee on Feb. 8 at 2 pm. The play will be staged in the Grand Lobby on Feb. 10 and 11 at 8 pm as well as a special “Sunrise Performance” scheduled for the morning of Feb. 7. The time has yet to be finalized.

Tickets are $22 for general admission, $15 for students and seniors and can be purchased online at theisabel.ca/tickets, at the Isabel box office (12:30-4:30 pm), or at the door prior to performances.

Source: Queens Unviersity

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How an innovative grants program (and Belgian beer mixers) at Johns Hopkins fuels discoveries about the human brain

A neuroscientist, an electrical engineer, a surgeon, and an education researcher walk up to a bar.

This could be the start of a joke, or it could be a scene from a recent Science of Learning Institute event at Johns Hopkins University. At the institute's four-times-yearly Belgian Beer Events, scientists from far-flung fields—and often from far-flung parts of the university itself—present their research to each other in short, digestible chunks. Their creativity and conviviality stimulated by a cup of ale or lager, the researchers strike up conversations and form connections that range widely across disciplinary boundaries, from classroom learning to machine learning, from recovery from stroke to memory formation in the brain.

Such conversations can be all too rare at a university where faculty are spread not just across a campus but throughout a large city and beyond. The result, for an inherently interdisciplinary subject like the science of learning, is that projects that could address fundamental and important questions can be hard to conceive and get off the ground. And too often, promising basic research doesn't get translated into the settings where it could help real-world learners.

The Belgian Beer Events, conceived shortly after the institute launched in 2013, are helping change that. They provide an informal space where basic researchers can meet translators, where machine-learning experts can meet early-childhood educators, where cognitive scientists can meet smartphone app developers. The events rotate between locations: October's was at the School of Education, and December's was hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering; previous ones were held at the School of Medicine and in Homewood's Levering Hall. Computer scientist Greg Hager likens the events to "an intellectual mixing bowl."

Beyond generating lively conversation, the gatherings are sparking collaborations between researchers who otherwise might never have met. At an event in 2013, neurologist Bonnie Nozari presented her work on speech and language processing disorders. Computer scientist Raman Arora then spoke about his work on machine learning and speech recognition. Recognizing a mutual interest in speech, the two chatted. The next day, they began planning a joint project to see if computers can predict how humans will pronounce words, and then provide feedback to people seeking to learn a new language, or to relearn how to speak after a stroke.

It sounds like a lucky encounter, but in fact electrical engineer Sanjeev Khudanpur, a member of the institute's steering committee, was at work behind the scenes. He conceived the Belgian Beer Events, and he made sure that Arora, his colleague in the Whiting School of Engineering, would be speaking on the same day as Nozari, of the School of Medicine. Later, when the two were ready to apply for funding, Khudanpur encouraged their ultimately successful proposal for one of the institute's research grants. "I see myself as a matchmaker," he says.

"It's that kind of really innovative, different seeding of projects that I think we've done really well," says Barbara Landau, the institute's director and the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The institute funded eight projects in 2013 and eight more in 2014, with projects receiving an average of $140,000 spread over two years. Funding goes to hiring graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, developing software, purchasing equipment, and supplying other research needs. The grants are competitive; the review committee has received around 30 proposals a year. The funded projects address a broad range of learning settings, from the classroom to the operating room to distance learning that can take place anywhere. The learners are not limited to humans, either; many of the projects include a strong component of "machine learning"—harnessing computers to recognize patterns in data and use them to develop new human learning applications. Other projects focus on developing animal models that can be used to study human learning.

The grant program allows researchers to get support for projects that might not be quite ready for a proposal to a traditional funding agency like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, says Landau. Almost without exception, an NSF or NIH review panel will want to see at least preliminary data demonstrating that an idea is viable. With Science of Learning Institute funding, scientists can do exploratory research that will provide the data needed to support a larger proposal to a more traditional funding agency. "It allows people to do things that they wouldn't necessarily be able to accomplish by a standard grant," says Landau. "The granting agencies tend to be somewhat conservative, and we're looking for innovation."

Like Arora and Nozari's collaboration, many of the funded projects harness existing technological applications to improve learning, often in novel ways. For example, Khudanpur and Hager are working with Gyusung Lee, an instructor of surgery in the School of Medicine, to develop computer software that can help teach surgeons how to use the da Vinci robotic surgical platform. The project grew out of an existing effort called the Language of Surgery, developed by researchers in the Whiting School of Engineering's Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

Through this effort, which began in 2006, Hager, Khudanpur, and colleagues program computers to record and analyze the different kinds of movements that surgeons make while performing certain tasks with surgical robots. The researchers' goal was to find movements that could consistently be classified as either expertlike or novicelike. Novice surgeons are more likely to break a suture, for example, or to push or pull on tissue while using the robot to manipulate a surgical needle. The researchers were able to train computer software to recognize such expert and novice movements much as a surgical trainer would.

The next step is to have the assessment tool provide real-time feedback to surgical trainees. With the kind of application the researchers are envisioning, trainees could, in theory, receive an unlimited amount of individualized feedback on what skills they have mastered and where more work is needed. "We're putting the computer in the human learning loop," Khudanpur says. "The computer has certain abilities that are complementary to humans. [For example,] the computer doesn't get tired. The computer usually doesn't charge by the hour."

A few years ago, when the researchers applied for an NIH grant to develop such a learning application, the proposal was rejected because they had no data showing the idea had promise. Thanks to their Science of Learning Institute research award, the scientists are starting to collect that data. Backed by some preliminary results, they recently put in a new NIH proposal and are waiting to hear back.

Meanwhile, thanks to a talk Hager gave last fall, his team's research may soon spawn another effort, which would take Language of Surgery technology out of the operating room and into the classroom. Hager's presentation inspired Landau and Amy Shelton, a professor in the School of Education, who is also on the institute's steering committee, to wonder whether motion-tracking software could recognize the movements that young children make when learning to build toy towers out of blocks. Spatial skills like tower building, in addition to being important in their own right, are of interest to researchers because they often predict children's future abilities in math and other areas. Hager, Landau, and Shelton are now discussing a potential project to put motion sensors on blocks and use computers to track how children acquire manipulation skills, a tactic similar to the one Hager's team uses to assess the skills of aspiring surgeons.

Institute-funded collaborations between computer scientists and education researchers are also reaching far beyond traditional education settings like medical training. In a project funded in 2014, computer scientists Philipp Koehn and Jason Eisner are teaming with Chadia Abras in the School of Education's Center for Technology Education to develop a radically new way to learn a foreign language. The idea is based on macaronic language—a kind of text that mixes two languages into a Spanglish-like hybrid. While such mixing has traditionally been employed by novice speakers or for satirical purposes, Eisner realized that coupled with recent advances in machine translation, it could also help introduce learners to foreign vocabulary and syntax in a gentle and piecemeal way rather than all at once, as in a typical foreign text read laboriously with the aid of a dictionary.

To implement the idea, the researchers are developing software that translates a text progressively, with more and more of the text appearing in the foreign language as the reader's comprehension improves. For an English-to-German learner, for instance, the English phrase "a loaf of bread" could start to appear as "ein Loaf of Bread." When the reader is comfortable with reading the German word "ein" instead of the English "a," the program could progress to "ein Breadloaf," resembling German in syntax but retaining English words. The text would then become "ein Brot loaf," and finally the fully German "ein Brotlaib*." The program will intermittently assess the student's reading comprehension and ability, and tune the amount of foreign language presented to the reader's progress; readers also can direct the program to make the translation easier or harder.

Since the concept still needs to be proved, it makes an ideal Science of Learning Institute project, says Koehn. Eisner adds, "It's a bet that this will work out and will not, for example, confuse people or give them bad habits." The researchers plan to develop an English-to-German application and test it on the Web and in Johns Hopkins classes in combination with more traditional classroom and textbook instruction. If successful, the software could also be made available on the Internet for independent learners.

The project exemplifies how interdisciplinary teams can merge cutting-edge research in machine and human learning, says Kelly Fisher, the institute's assistant director and an assistant professor in the School of Education. "It's a software program that is learning itself, learning about the learner."

Institute-funded research also targets learners far beyond those who are acquiring skills for the first time. Learning is critical for the millions of people who lose skills when they suffer strokes and other neurological conditions and then need to regain them, often through lengthy and complex rehabilitation processes. Research on how to more efficiently relearn lost skills could make a huge difference in how quickly such people can return to work and fully participate in society again.

Cognitive scientist Michael McCloskey recently discovered a new, debilitating, and apparently very rare reading deficit known as alphanumeric visual awareness deficit, or AVAD. McCloskey, a professor in Cognitive Science, identified the condition based on two cases that came to him in one year. One of them, a 61-year-old Baltimore geologist with a neurological disease, could see fine in general, but when looking at letters or numbers, he saw only blurs. McCloskey and his colleagues found, however, that by teaching the patient new characters to use in place of the digits, they could restore his recognition abilities. The researchers developed a smartphone calculator app and modified the geologist's laptop to allow him to do math with the new symbols.

Seeking to build on this work, McCloskey assembled a team of neurologists and cognitive scientists to look for more people with AVAD in order to study the condition using brain imaging and other techniques, and to develop apps and other technology that would help affected people make sense of letters and numbers again. But the researchers have run into a roadblock: They haven't found a single other case of AVAD beyond the original two. A woman in North Carolina who seemed to have the deficit turned out to have a somewhat different condition. "On the one hand, it's interesting that [AVAD is] so rare; on the other hand, it's not what we were hoping for," McCloskey says.

So he and his team have reoriented their project, broadening the scope to include more-common character recognition disorders. For example, some people cannot recognize a number or letter when it is presented to them whole but can recognize a character if they watch it being drawn. Perhaps, says McCloskey, a smartphone app could be developed to read signs and other important text, and draw each character in sequence for people with this deficit. His team is also starting to collaborate with a software developer, MicroBLINK, to make an app that would identify characters and then read the text aloud.

In addition to potentially helping people regain lost abilities, many institute-funded projects such as McCloskey's are aimed at teasing apart the different brain regions and processes responsible for seemingly coherent learned skills like reading. Along these lines but focusing on an entirely different brain function, psychologist Marina Bedny, of the Krieger School's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, is heading a team that received an institute grant to study how the brain can retool its hardware when the original purpose of one of its regions is no longer needed. In sighted people, around a quarter of the brain is devoted to visual processing; in blind people, these brain regions get repurposed. How does this work? Bedny wondered.

To investigate this question, she and colleagues in the Krieger School's Department of Cognitive Science and in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the School of Medicine are combining language comprehension assessments with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. They hope to learn whether brain regions normally devoted to sight are needed for language processing in blind people. The researchers recently collected data at a National Federation of the Blind convention and are in the process of testing a control group of sighted people. This effort would have been impossible without a source of support for interdisciplinary projects, Bedny says. "You just can't do this kind of research without an interdisciplinary team because you need so many different kinds of expertise," from linguistics to neuroimaging to TMS. "We really needed the whole team to make it happen."

In another example of institute-funded brain research, neuroscientist David Foster, of the School of Medicine, is taking on perhaps the most basic of all aspects of learning: memory formation. Specifically, Foster is interested in how certain kinds of memories are formed in a brain region called the hippocampus. He has studied this process in detail in rat brains, using dozens of implanted electrodes to precisely record electrical signals as the rats' neurons fire in sequences that represent stored memories. Foster would like to carry out similar studies in humans, but he cannot just go sticking electrodes deep into people's brains. So he first needs to develop less-invasive procedures.

Foster and William Anderson, an associate professor of neurosurgery in the School of Medicine, are now developing such techniques, piggybacking on research that Anderson's group does on epilepsy patients wherein they collect and analyze electrical data gathered from the surface of the brain. By piloting their study on a small sample of patients, the researchers hope to strengthen their position for applying for a larger grant, possibly from the NIH.

Bedny and Foster, both assistant professors, say that institute funding has allowed them to take on projects that might have otherwise been too risky and uncertain for an untenured faculty member. "I probably would not do too much looking outside of my own area to collaborate if I wasn't pushed and incentivized to do so by this kind of mechanism," Foster says. "This allows me, and pays me, to invest in thinking outside of my own small area."

The research grant program is the Science of Learning Institute's first major initiative, and many of the projects from the initial funding round are close to reporting results. The institute plans to continue awarding grants for at least three more years, and possibly more, depending on funding. To assess the program's success, Landau and Fisher are tracking metrics such as publications that awardees produce and external awards that leverage institute-funded work.

The institute also just launched its second big initiative: the Distinguished Science of Learning Fellowship Program. This program will award around five postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships annually to students wanting to pursue interdisciplinary research in learning. Each fellow will have two advisers from different disciplines.

The fellows also will play a key role in the third prong of the institute's mission: translating and disseminating results beyond academia. Traditionally, much of the learning that occurs in the nation's formal classrooms and more informal settings is not as informed by research as it could be, says Fisher. To help change that, the Science of Learning Institute recently launched partnerships with the Port Discovery Children's Museum in Baltimore and the Children's Museum of Manhattan in New York to develop exhibits that are based on the research into the science of learning. The institute also plans to hire a dissemination expert to help translate research results into classrooms and other learning settings.

The Science of Learning Institute's stated mission is "to understand and optimize the most essential part of our human capital: the ability to learn." The mission makes the institute a crucial catalyst at a university—a place dedicated to learning—where all the pieces are already in place to make major progress on one of the most important scientific questions of our time, says Landau. "One of the goals of the Science of Learning Institute," she says, "is really to sew together the parts of the university that haven't yet interacted—to make it, in President Daniels' words, one university."

Source: JHU

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Johns Hopkins student's neuroscience major inspires her first novel

First-time author Marlene Kanmogne IMAGE: MARSHALL CLARKE

One night, Marlene Kanmogne had a dream. She dreamed that she could change reality and shift what was happening around her just by thinking about it.

When Kanmogne awoke, she was overcome by a feeling of power and control, emotion and energy that was so vivid and captivating that she didn't want it to end.

So the junior neuroscience major, who grew up in Cameroon and Oklahoma, decided to write it down. Over the next four years, she transferred the ongoing dream of the girl who could make things happen with her mind into a series of spiral notebooks.

"When I write, it's like there's a film in my head that I transcribe to paper as quickly as I can so that I don't lose the film," Kanmogne says.

It wasn't easy. When school was in session and there was class or volunteering or work with the African Students Association, she was far too busy to write as much as she wanted. But she persevered, completed her story, and this summer even got it published. "I'm a planner—I like to set goals and complete them," she says. "Not finishing was not an option."

The result is The Mind Wanderer (Solstice Press, 2014), a 305-page young adult novel about a 15-year-old girl named Melissa who realizes she has a powerful mind-transforming ability that's much bigger than she is and must adapt to it and accept its consequences.

Kanmogne, 20, hopes to become a physician. She always viewed the book as a personal project. Even after its publication, she has some difficulty accepting notice for being a novelist. Instead, she'd rather discuss the intricacies of the brain. "I do like writing—it's a great hobby of mine. But I think what really drives me is the mind part, the brain part. It all starts and ends with the brain," she says.

Yet, with a year and a half of college, medical school, and residency still ahead, she's not willing to leave her writing hobby behind. The Mind Wanderer, she says, is only book one of three.

"I still have dreams that further the story, and I know what Melissa will do," Kanmogne says. "I see the path of her life, and I want to follow it. And that just keeps picking at me to the point where I have to put it down on paper."

Source: JHU

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Researcher uncovers surprising cause of the demise of Easter Island indigenous population

Easter Island Credit: Yale

A new paper by a team of researchers including a Virginia Commonwealth University anthropology professor sheds new light on what led to the downfall of the indigenous population of Easter Island — also known as Rapa Nui — prior to European contact in 1722.

The study, "Variation in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Land Use Indicates Production and Population Peaks Prior to European Contact," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the population's demise likely had more to do with pre-existing environmental conditions than with environmental degradation by the indigenous people.

Christopher Stevenson, Ph.D., an assistant professor of anthropology in the School of World Studies in the College of Humanities and Sciences, recently discussed his team's findings with VCU News.

Your paper explores what led to the collapse of the prehistoric population of Rapa Nui. What did you conclude?

Our paper evaluates a longstanding debate and examines whether the prehistoric population of Rapa Nui experienced a significant islandwide demographic collapse prior to European contact in A.D. 1722. We have used dates from hydrated obsidian artifacts recovered from habitation sites as a proxy for land use over time. The analysis suggests region-specific dynamics that include abandonment of western coast and interior locations. These temporal land-use patterns correlate with rainfall variation and soil quality. The environmental stresses are regionally specific rather than islandwide. Significant erosion around the entire island generated by deforestation has been hypothesized by other researchers as a cause for economic failure. This does not hold up to scrutiny.

How would you characterize the significance of your findings?

This analysis demonstrates that the concept of a sudden "collapse" is a misleading characterization of prehistoric human population dynamics. As a result, we see our approach as useful in the study of other prehistoric societies for which a very rapid demographic collapse has been proposed in prehistory.

Although small, islands can be complex ecosystems that are structured by climatic variation and underlying geology. Human activities are constrained by these parameters and can even cause the ecosystem conditions to change appreciably through their manipulation of the landscape.

Were you surprised by what you found? In what ways?

The results of our research were really quite surprising to our team. Indeed, in the past we’ve published articles about how there was little evidence for pre-European contact societal collapse. When we proposed the [National Science Foundation-funded] project we were expecting that we would gather data supporting the notion that change did not occur until after European contact. In contrast our research suggests that significant changes in land use occurred prior to European contact. The connection between those changes in land use and notions of environmental degradation and subsequent societal collapse are limited.

There is no evidence that massive physical erosion took place on Rapa Nui before European contact and it is unlikely that physical erosion caused productivity decline and societal collapse. While we do not have direct population data, it is clear that people were reacting to regional environmental variation on the island before they were devastated by the introduction of European diseases and other historic processes. In short, our research does not support the suggestion that societal collapse occurred prior to European contact due to physical erosion and productivity decline, but it does indicate that use of less optimal environmental regions changed prior to European contact.

What did your research methodology entail?

We used a method called obsidian hydration dating to date the human creation of volcanic glass tools found at habitation sites. These dates were a proxy for the relative number of people on the island throughout prehistory. We also used an analysis of soil nutrients to look at the fertility of various landforms (e.g., coastal vs. upland) at different elevations up to 500 meters above sea level.

You've written several books on Rapa Nui. What led to your interest in this topic?

This is a continuation of my interest in looking at the development of agricultural systems in small island societies and how that impacts social and economic decisions made in prehistory.

What will you be working on next?

We will be applying some of the same concepts to the Canary Island agricultural systems which have a much higher diversity of geological ages and climatic conditions.

Source: Vcu

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Peru’s indigenous people call for protections against environmental threats

As delegates from around the world gather in Lima, Peru, to work on a framework on climate change, thousands of Peruvians flocked to the capital to demand better protection for their lands and cultures. As part of our Culture at Risk series, Jeffrey Brown reports from Lima on the struggle to balance the protection of remote indigenous communities with industry and growth.
Credit: Jeffrey Brown

GWEN IFILL: International delegates have gathered for climate change talks in Lima, Peru, this week, hoping to build the framework for a plan to cut the world’s heat-trapping gas emissions.

Secretary of State John Kerry arrived there today to help with that new accord. But, for many Peruvians, the focus is local, as mining and timber operations encroach into once pristine areas inhabited by indigenous tribes.

Jeffrey Brown is in Lima, and has this report, part of his series Culture at Risk.

JEFFREY BROWN: There were dancers and drummers, banners and chants, traditional clothing of all kinds, a march of thousands, many of them tribal people, that shut down part of downtown Lima for several hours, demanding better protection of their lands and their cultures. They came from near and far, some very far.

This group from the Ucayali region in Eastern Peru had traveled for several days, by boat, plane, and bus, to get here from their remote homes.

Grimaldo Villacorta heads the group.

GRIMALDO VILLACORTA (through interpreter): For us, as an indigenous population, it’s important to be here, because we want to stop climate change. We used to have regular seasons, summer and winter, during which we planted our seeds. But now, with the climate changing, we can work the land, but sometimes we cannot plant seeds. There is no production.

JEFFREY BROWN: This demonstration was set up as a kind of counterpoint to the official climate talks going on across town. The idea is to raise awareness about the increasing and increasingly violent encroachment on tribal lands in Peru and elsewhere around the globe.

Throughout the crowd, portraits of one of the martyrs of this movement, Edwin Chota, a Peruvian environmental activist from the Ashaninka Indian tribe who’d spent years fighting illegal logging on his community’s lands.

In September, Chota and three others from the village of Saweto were shot and killed near the Brazilian border, in the vast Amazon Basin that’s home to about half of Peru’s more than 1,500 indigenous communities, with some 300,000 people. Chota had spoken of threats he received as he fought to gain official title to his lands and keep loggers at bay.

EDWIN CHOTA, Environmental Activist (through interpreter): They are loggers. They have arms. They have everything. And they are never going to pay attention to us. So we need the support of government institutions to protect the region at the border.

JEFFREY BROWN: Chota’s remains were found by a river near his home. Two loggers have been charged with his murder.

That and other incidents led the advocacy group Global Witness to declare Peru one of the world’s most dangerous countries for environmental activists. And by all accounts, illegal logging, mining, and drug trafficking have been on the rise in this area. The World Bank estimates, for example, that some 80 percent of Peru’s timber exports were cut without a permit.

In Lima this week, Patricia Balbuena, the vice culture minister who overseas indigenous relations, said the government is working to resolve land ownership disputes, but that administrations past and present have struggled to ensure legal rights and safety in these distant communities.

PATRICIA BALBUENA, Vice Minister of Intercultural Affairs, Peru (through interpreter): These are remote areas with very little government presence because of geographical barriers. For example, from the capital of Pucallpa region to the community of Saweto, it takes six to eight days by boat.

That is why the most important issue is to assure the government’s presence, not only in terms of a military or police presence, but also in what a government should provide to its indigenous populations: health, education, social services, and security.

JEFFREY BROWN: Encroachment deep into Amazon forests may also be behind scenes like this, as previously isolated or uncontacted tribes come into the open.

Last year, more than 100 members of the Mashco-Piro tribe appeared at a river in Southeast Peru.

Anthropologist Beatriz Huertas studies groups like this who’ve chosen to live apart from civilization. She thinks she knows why more are now making contact.

BEATRIZ HUERTAS, Anthropologist (through interpreter): I think that, first of all, it’s owed to the great pressures on their lands and natural resources, and that those are forcing these isolated peoples to alter their ways and are leading to their displacement.

JEFFREY BROWN: There are more such tribes than you might think. The advocacy group Survival International estimates there are 15 in Peru alone, and at least 100 around the globe.

The highest concentration is here in the Amazon. Citing the threat of contagious disease and other problems that have decimated previously uncontacted tribes, Beatriz Huertas says the government needs to take immediate action.

BEATRIZ HUERTAS (through interpreter): To protect them, it’s necessary to officially recognize their lands and to establish a series of protection mechanisms to guarantee their lives, their health and the right of these populations to decide for themselves what lives they want to live.

JEFFREY BROWN: I asked Vice Minister Balbuena the overarching question, how Peru can foster investment and growth, while also protecting vulnerable people and cultures.

PATRICIA BALBUENA (through interpreter): I think we always feel we need to do more. I think the demands of the indigenous peoples require us to act faster. And we can’t advance a peaceful society if we don’t find a balancing point between growth on the one hand and respect and protection of rights on the other.

JEFFREY BROWN: Achieving a balance has also, of course, been on the minds of attendees at the climate change summit this week in Lima. After years of setbacks and sidesteps, the goal here is for nations to commit, or at least commit to committing, to specific domestic emissions cuts.

The grand hope, a new global treaty to be signed at next year’s meeting in Paris. The effort got a boost last month with an agreement between China and the U.S., the world’s largest economies and polluters, to limit their greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades.

In pavilions open to the public, Peruvians of all ages took in exhibitions that explained the tangible effects of climate change. There, conference attendee Chris Field told me he felt encouraged by what he’d heard so far at the meetings, but that huge challenges remained.

CHRIS FIELD, Carnegie Institution: The big challenge is ambition of mitigation, how much we decrease the emissions of heat-trapping gases, ambition of adaption, how much we invest in helping people cope with the climate changes that can’t be avoided, and how tightly those two things should be connected.

JEFFREY BROWN: And getting — and getting individual countries to actually make commitments.

CHRIS FIELD: Well, what you find is that, kind of constitutionally, there’s a difference between the perspective that the developed countries take, which is really focused on mitigation aspects, and the developing countries, who want to see much more of a interlinkage between investments in decreasing amounts of heat-trapping gases and increasing investments in helping people cope.

JEFFREY BROWN: Case in point, of course, is the host country itself, which faces many long-term environmental threats and, as tribal demonstrators shouted in the streets, immediate, urgent ones that demand answers and actions.

I’m Jeffrey Brown reporting from Lima for the “PBS NewsHour.”

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Source: PBS

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Sculpting costumes with 3-D printers is 'the way theater is headed,' say theater education experts

Baylor junior Mackenzie Dobbs, a theatre performance major, in a witch's costume decorated with beans and mushrooms produced from a 3D printer. Credit: Drapers: Sylvia Fuhrken and Ryan Schapp, Photo by Jared Tseng

Three-dimensional printers, which already have churned out jewelry, prosthetic limbs and one fully functioning car, are taking the stage -- literally -- in another arena: live theater.

They allow greater speed, flexilibity, creativity -- and can appease directors who change their minds mid-rehearsal.

Synthetic beans and mushrooms -- accessories for the cursed, hump-backed witch in a Baylor University production of the musical "Into the Woods" -- recently emerged from a little machine tucked away in a corner of the costume shop at Baylor. And that's only the beginning for the new printer, says former Disneyland costume designer/wardrobe coordinator Joe Kucharski, assistant professor of theatre arts at Baylor.

Using his computer mouse and some free software, Kucharski tugged, flattened and pinched a digital "ball of clay" into the desired shapes: rotting vegetables, including two dozen beans and a dozen mushrooms. That done, the 3D printer heated and spun plastic cord into the delicate thread to create the costume elements for the witchy wardrobe.

Depending on the size and how complicated a design is, 3D printing may take 20 minutes to a couple hours.

"You can set a few buttons and walk away during printing," Kucharski said. "You can customize and print multiples, and you can use colors that are the whole range of the rainbow.

"Designers are always thinking, 'How can we design quickly but keep it adjustable so we're ready if the director says, 'Well, we're kinda there. . .'? We can go back and tweak quickly."

The printers have been used in film and fashion, and "it's a great application for scenic design in theater, too," he said. "You can use miniatures created on a small-scale model and save time instead of carving little details."

The 3D printer is rapidly becoming part of the "designer tool bag." While students still need to learn traditional drawing and creating, incorporating 3D technology into curriculum for costume and prop design can give them an edge in the job market.

"This is the way theatre is going," said Stan Denman, Ph.D., chair and professor of theatre arts at Baylor. "This even lets us create items that are no longer being produced -- like brooches or hatpins -- for period plays. Otherwise, because those things are antiques, the cost is prohibitive.

"This also can be helpful if you have an item that has to be broken in a scene," he said. "You can have multiple items to replace it for repeat performances."

Source: Baylor University

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